Don't let social distancing stop employee development

How do you more effectively drive learner engagement and concept retention in your digital learning courses? Sound is key. Why? Sound elicits emotional responses which make moments more memorable, and also shapes your unique sense of space, time, and reality. Adding a layer of sound would amplify presentations of any kind.There are three elements to consider when incorporating sound into digital learning courses: sound effects, voice talent, and transitions.

1. Engaging sound effectsPractitioners of mindfulness meditation focus on the present moment in order to reach a particular mental state. The present moment is always changing, of course, depending on the surrounding constellation of smells, sounds, sights, and feelings. Try to isolate the ambient sounds in the air, and you will come to appreciate both the limits of your focus and the omnipresence of sound. Note, too, how memories involving both sight and sound are more vivid than those derived from just one sensory channel.Sound effects can perform numerous functions: emphasize a particular point, underscore a key concept, balance serious content with humor, and more. Try, for instance, to imagine films such as Star Wars, Titanic, or The Godfather without their orchestral scores and soundtracks. Just as sound effects are critical to each story on an emotional level, they can make the digital learning experience more meaningful and memorable.Consider using ambient sounds that are colloquial to your learners, such as the "ding" signaling the arrival of a new text message, or the "whoosh" of sending an email. Using these sounds tactfully throughout your presentations will increase learner engagement by initiating states of excitement, focus, or reflection. However, be sparing in your use of such effects, as space is essential for the appreciation of sonic subtleties.
2. Appropriate voice talentYour choice of voice talent is critical – any recognizably-human voices invoked for digital-learning purposes must align with your organization’s cultural DNA and corporate identity.For the digital learning course in question, be sure to consider its subject matter, audience, and tone. After identifying each, decide whether a stodgy accent, homey lilt, or something else entirely would facilitate the most engaging learning experience. Once you have a few options, be sure to send samples to your client for feedback and approval. Reactions to voices, after all, are highly personal.
3. TransitionsTry now to pinpoint all the recurring noises around you, whether infrequent or ever-present. Depending on where you are, you may hear the low hum of a fridge, the persistent honk of a horn, or even the steady beating of your heart. These periodic sounds, absorbed subconsciously, signify the passage of time and transformation of your surroundings.Transition sounds, like the famous musical motifs in each aforementioned film, aid in memory retention by stimulating an emotion, foreshadowing an event, or accentuating a concept. In digital learning courses, transitions work best at the beginning and end of a module. That said, if placed tastefully throughout a course, transition sounds will add polish, build a brand, and encode content in a memorable way.

These are just a few of the ways that sound can be used in your digital learning courses as a design pillar, making training more engaging and enjoyable. Whether you meditate or passively absorb your surroundings, sound adds texture, depth, and meaning to the fabric of our lives. How will you use sound to build your next creation?

E-learning designers are still catching up to what brand differentiation experts have known for a long time. Experience matters.

Consider Bubly, a maker of sparkling water, recently purchased by PepsiCo. Bubly doesn’t try to differentiate at the product level: in a blind taste test between Bubly and LaCroix, participants were unable to tell one from the other. Instead, Bubly focuses on the consumer’s experience of the product.

To begin, there’s the enthusiastic welcome: each can features a pull-tab greeting that mimics text messages – “hey u,” “hiii,” or “yo,” – simulating the kind of playful rapport you might have with friends and family. Next, the product’s peach, pineapple, and grapefruit-toned cans and smiling logo work together to convey positivity, creating a look and feel that aligns seamlessly with its slogan: “no calories. no sweeteners. all smiles.” Finally, Bubly gamifies buying. As writer Elizabeth Demolat points out, no store stocks all twelve flavors at any one time, leading to online and in-person buzz about where to find specific flavors. This strategy, along with the release of a variety of limited-edition flavors, has essentially turned “the act of purchasing a product into a treasure hunt.”

Bubly’s brand differentiation leverages enthusiasm, emotion, and excitement—experiential elements that echo the design pillars of best-in-class e-learning. Here’s how to incorporate each.

1. Enthusiasm

Find new ways to breath energy into the experience. Take, for example, a short, animated video that uses action film motifs to explore emotional awareness in the workplace.

The sequence begins with an establishing shot of a manager providing constructive feedback to an employee. The action moves quickly into the employee’s brain, which is set up as a command center. A group of intelligence agents, straight out of Mission Impossible, look on with alarm. One more word from the manager on “areas for improvement,” and the emotion-regulating amygdala will be triggered, hijacking the employee’s normal reasoning processes. The intelligence agents strategize, introducing different tools and techniques that can be used to regain perspective, and the learning journey begins to take shape.

Greeted with a fresh, playful take on a critical workplace competency, learners are primed to go deeper.

2. Emotion

How do you get beyond the rational regions of your brain – the ones that “control language, but not decision-making” – to tap into feelings and emotions? One particularly creative course on human anatomy leverages powerful visuals to reach learners on that deeper level.

Participants begin by learning that there are more nerve cells in the brain than stars in the Milky Way, observing a close-up of the brain’s circuitry dissolving into tiny specks lighting up the night sky. Because the underlying anatomy remains hidden, medical-aesthetics practitioners learn that they will essentially be working in the dark. The stars fade out slowly, one by one, until there’s nothing left on screen but total darkness—a strange, slightly unnerving experience that drives home the importance of understanding anatomical structures on a visceral level.

3. Excitement

Give people something they’ve never experienced before by challenging the norms of typical training.

Data-protection policies, for instance, are critical safeguards wherever they’re in place, but existing e-learning on the subject is almost always designed as a passive, one-way transmission of information. One exceptional data-protection course takes a different approach, using live-action video and a dramatic soundtrack to depict a privacy breach occurring in real time.

While this can get gimmicky, immersing learners in a volatile environment with uncertain outcomes builds tension, a key lever for creating buy-in.

‍So, how can we help clients build better learning experiences?

‍Many clients see digital learning as a product, one that looks a lot like what’s already out there: didactic, uninspired, dull. By nudging clients toward digital learning courses that mirror what they already know about branding, we might just be able to help them build experiences that stand out in a crowd.

The conversation around mobile learning has changed in recent years. Once viewed as merely a technical consideration (i.e., making sure training “works” on mobile devices), organizations now recognize mobile learning’s unique potential. The cadence of mobile learning is perfectly aligned with contemporary learners’ needs, and whether the method used is microlearning, spaced learning, learning journeys, continuous learning cultures, or personalized learning, organizations are delivering more value.However, in the new era of mobile learning, many organizations struggle with where to start. Best-in-class organizations use a shift to mobile as a way to rethink their learning strategy, rather than simply update a mode of delivery. Here are a few real-life examples.

1. Onboarding
   ‍Mobile learning proves particularly effective as an onboarding tool in deskless environments such as retail, in-field technical support, and safety. For example, one global coffee retailer, challenged with rapid scalability in emerging markets, uses mobile deployment to streamline competency formation for its newly hired baristas, ensuring a consistent brand experience.Additionally, mobile learning promotes a more journey-driven approach to onboarding, taking the pressure off single-event training. Employees now have a tool in their pocket that provides gradual reinforcement, helping them recall hundreds of espresso drink combinations in the moment.Adaptive retrieval practices also help support the onboarding journey in the initial phases of the baristas’ tenure. Push notifications remind baristas to continue working on their skills, while weekly challenges, mini-games, and leaderboards help sustain engagement. Flashcards (featuring information such as the right syrup ratios for customized drinks), are self-paced reference tools, which they can use in the moment of need.

2. Upskilling
   ‍A Canadian financial services advisory organization required a radical approach to reach its unique target audience: entrepreneurs. Familiar with entrepreneurs’ resistance to standard training modalities, the organization created a mobile solution with a new learning cadence customized for its ever-distracted, highly-resistant learners, replacing large-format, single-event courseware with quick lessons (of no more than five minutes each), ongoing knowledge checks, personalized learning paths, and a strong resource library for ongoing performance support. The organization can now meet its entrepreneurial customers’ individual learning needs

2. Sales
   ‍Mobile learning is proving to be a differentiator for delivering content to sales teams. For a major global automotive company, mobile learning enables its salespeople on the floor to keep up with sophisticated customers who walk into showrooms fluent in specific car models, pricing, and competitive offerings. Mobile learning helps the salespeople stay agile, providing product information updates and timely needs-based support through an adaptive learning engine.Even augmented reality plays a role in creating intuitive and quick access to content within a high-context environment: sales reps can point their phone to a new model on the showroom floor and immediately see information on specific aspects of the car. Off the floor, they can refresh their knowledge by completing retrieval practices, reviewing key selling scenarios through immersive interactive challenges, and consulting with mobile-friendly job aids prior to their next customer interaction. For this organization’s salespeople, mobile learning is indispensable when it comes to keeping up with customers.

Mobile learning is an effective training delivery platform in these examples and beyond. Successful organizations see the potential for mobile as a platform, rather than as a technology wrapper, and take a unique approach to its design. If you’re looking to make a bold statement and revolutionize training, leverage mobile learning as the catalyst.

Organizations have long wanted to scale coaching, but have been limited by cost and capacity. With AI, that's beginning to change as new platforms make coaching more accessible, flexible, and available on demand, extending support beyond a select group of leaders to entire populations.

For talent leaders, this shift creates both opportunity and complexity. With greater reach comes a new set of trade-offs: how to balance access with depth, flexibility with accountability, and efficiency with meaningful development.

The limits of unlimited (coaching).

Unlimited coaching sounds like the obvious answer. Remove the barriers, give everyone access, let people engage on their own terms. What's not to like?

In practice, quite a bit.

When coaching has no defined structure or cadence, engagement tends to become episodic - people show up when something feels urgent and step back when it doesn't. The coaching relationship never quite deepens. Conversations cover ground but don't build on it. And the development that was supposed to happen keeps getting pushed to the next session, and the next.

Three patterns emerge:

1.  Sporadic engagement over sustained development. Without a rhythm to anchor the work, coaching becomes reactive. Clients bring whatever is most pressing that week rather than working toward something larger. Progress happens in bursts, if at all.
2. ‍Insights that don't compound. Great coaching reveals patterns over time - things a client can't see in one session but can't unsee after several. Without continuity, and without a consistent coaching relationship to hold the thread, each conversation starts close to zero.‍
3. Outcomes that are hard to measure. No milestones. No defined endpoint. No clear way for the organization, or the client, to know whether it's working. Activity fills the gap where impact should be.

The result is a model that's easy to scale and hard to defend. Which is exactly the problem talent leaders are navigating right now.

The relationship is the lever.

Decades of research into what makes coaching work keeps arriving at the same answer: it's the relationship. Not the platform, not the methodology. The relationship.

When a coach and client build trust over time, developing shared language, and returning to the same themes with increasing depth, something shifts. Conversations get more honest. Insights stick. The client starts doing the work between sessions, not just during them. That's when coaching becomes genuinely transformative, and it can't be rushed or replicated in a one-off session.

The ICF and EMCC are clear on this: continuity is what dives outcomes. The coaching engagements that produce lasting change are the ones where each session builds on the last, not the ones that simply offer more access.

Three principles make that possible: Consistency, Continuity, and Completion.

1. Consistency

The foundation everything else is built on.

The temptation when designing a coaching program is to treat flexibility as a feature - let people book when they want, swap coaches freely, engage on their own schedule. But frequent coach changes reset the clock. Every new coach has to earn trust, learn context, and find their footing with the client. That's time spent getting started, not getting somewhere.

A stable coaching relationship works differently:

• The coach starts to see around corners, uncovering patterns the client can't see on their own
• The client stops performing and starts being honest
• The relationship itself becomes a source of accountability, not just the sessions

Consistency doesn't constrain the work. It's what makes the deeper work possible.

2. Continuity

What turns a series of sessions into genuine development.

Without continuity, coaching tends to be additive at best- each session offers something useful, but nothing compounds. With it, the work builds on itself in ways that can't happen in isolated conversations.

What continuity makes possible:

• A limiting belief surfaced in session three becomes a thread that runs through the rest of the engagement
• A behavioral pattern the client couldn't see at the start becomes impossible to ignore by the end
• Space opens up for the harder work - the kind that requires sitting with discomfort across multiple sessions, not resolving it quickly and moving on

That slower, deeper work is where lasting change actually happens. It doesn't come from more sessions. It comes from the right sessions, in the right order, with the same person.

3. Completion

The most underrated principle of the three.

In a world of unlimited access, there's no finish line, and without one, it's surprisingly hard to know what you're working toward, or whether you've gotten there. A defined endpoint changes the entire shape of an engagement.‍

A clear endpoint creates urgency and focuses every session on what matters most.

• Shifts the question from "what should we talk about this week?" to "what do we need to accomplish before we're done?"
• Gives both coach and client a body of work to look back on, not just a log of conversations

For talent leaders, this is also what makes coaching legible as an investment. Sessions logged is an activity metric. A cohort of leaders who completed a structured engagement and can articulate what changed, that's a result.

Don't just scale it, design it (here’s how)‍ 

The opportunity in front of talent leaders right now is significant. The organizations that will get the most from this moment are the ones that treat coaching design as seriously as coaching delivery.

Practical design decisions:

• Define the arc before you launch: set the number of sessions, the cadence, and the goals upfront, not after people have already started booking
• Protect the coaching relationship: Make coach switching the exception, not the default, and design your program to discourage unnecessary re-matches
• Build in milestones: create structured check-ins at the midpoint and end of each engagement so progress is visible to both the coach and the organization ‍
• Separate on-demand support from developmental coaching: Use AI-enabled tools for in-the-moment guidance, and reserve structured engagements for the deeper work ‍
• Measure completion, not just activation: Track how many people finish an engagement, not just how many start one

Questions to pressure-test your design:

• Does every participant know what they're working toward before their first session?
• Can your coaches see enough context about a client's journey to pick up where they left off?
• Would you be able to show, at the end of a cohort, what changed, and for whom?

Access opened the door. Intention is what makes it worth walking through.

Three decisions that changed everything.

Two years ago, we made three deliberate decisions about how BTS would move with Applied AI.

We would become our own Customer Zero.

While others were building strategies, defining governance, and waiting for clarity, we made a different call: we decided not to wait. Not because the stakes were low, but because they were high. And because in a space evolving this quickly, clarity wouldn’t come from planning. It would come from movement.

So instead of starting with a roadmap, we started with three principles:

1. No top-down mandate. The people closest to the work figure it out.
2. IT must evolve from gatekeeper to enabler - leading AI trials and fast experimentation.
3. Don’t wait for certainty.

We set the organization in motion, and once we did, things started to move quickly.

What if we started this company today?

Waiting for certainty is itself a choice, and it’s costing companies more than they realize.

We started where we knew the work best: our simulations. No perfect plan, just teams moving, trying, and iterating.

Simulations are core to who we are at BTS. Companies that simulate don’t just make better decisions; they execute faster and build more engaged cultures.

The team asked a simple question:

"What if we were to start our company today?”

That question started the flywheel.

They asked IT for a few licenses and started building - vibe-coding, writing agents, and testing tools - moving at a pace that would make any VC-backed start-up smile.

The messy middle.

At first, the team was underwhelmed._‍

The early reports were blunt:

“Not good with math.”

“Poor graph capabilities.”

The team wasn't discouraged. They kept tinkering - jumping between tools, staying on top of new releases, experimenting constantly.

This was a small team, across 24 countries, building off each other’s ideas. Laughing at crazy creations. Breaking things. Iterating in a sandbox alongside real clientwork.

Each cycle produced something:

• A sharper scenario
• A faster build
• A more powerful simulation

The flywheel was turning, and it was generating something real.

When the diamond appeared.

Then something shifted.

The team moved into client trials across five countries. They figured out ISO compliance and built the architecture to handle the complexity, the “spaghetti.”

And what emerged wasn’t incremental:

• What used to take weeks started happening in days.
• Limited creativity started to feel like unlimited innovation.
• Clients became self-serving.
• Agentic simulations were built directly into client systems for real-time updates and preparation.

This was our first AI diamond - a high-impact outcome created by many cycles of experimentation compounding into real value.

It only appeared because we kept the flywheel turning, each cycle increasing the odds that something would break through.

95% adoption in eight weeks.

Then it was time to take the AI diamond global.

BTS is decentralized and highly entrepreneurial. We operate across 24 countries and 38 offices, where local teams have real autonomy.

And historically? That’s meant a low appetite for adopting something built somewhere else and pushed from the center.

So we expected resistance.

Instead, something surprising happened.

In the first eight weeks, we saw 95% adoption across our global footprint.

It felt completely different from our own digital initiatives, ERP implementations, top-down rollouts of the past.

This moved on its own. Why? 

We realized it didn’t start with a framework or a model, it started with a feeling.

The feeling of being at the leading edge of one’s craft and profession.

• Joy
• Excitement
• Pride

As we watched this play out across teams it stopped feeling like isolated wins.

There was a pattern to it. A repeatable, organic, innovation motion.

And the flywheel didn’t stop with simulations.

It spread across finance, sales enablement, legal, operations, and client delivery. Some cycles led to small improvements, and others revealed new diamonds.

Not becausewe planned for them, but because we built the conditions for people to find them.

The question I'd ask any CEO right now: Is your flywheel turning, or are you still waiting for the perfect plan?

In part 2, I’ll share the key success factors behind the breakthrough, and what we’re now seeing across more than 120 global clients.

‍

La maggior parte delle riunioni di vendita non fallisce.
Semplicemente non porta a una decisione.

Ed è lì che si perde valore.

I clienti di oggi sono più informati, più selettivi e hanno meno tempo.
Non hanno bisogno di altre presentazioni di prodotto.
‍
Hanno bisogno di conversazioni che li aiutino a stabilire le priorità, decidere e andare avanti.

Eppure, il 58% delle riunioni di vendita non riesce a creare valore reale.
Non perché i venditori manchino di capacità, ma perché le conversazioni non sono progettate per far avanzare le decisioni.

“I clienti non agiscono su ogni esigenza che riconoscono.
Agiscono quando qualcosa diventa una priorità.”

In questo breve executive brief scoprirai:

• Perché la maggior parte delle conversazioni informa… ma non porta all’azione
• Cosa spinge davvero i clienti a stabilire priorità e muoversi
• Come creare urgenza senza compromettere la fiducia
• Il passaggio dal presentare soluzioni al facilitare decisioni
• Cosa distingue le conversazioni che si bloccano da quelle che accelerano il progresso

Se i tuoi team stanno affrontando trattative bloccate, decisioni ritardate o un pipeline lento, questo brief ti aiuterà a capire il perché e cosa fare in modo diverso.

Scarica l’executive brief e scopri come progettare conversazioni che portano davvero a decisioni.